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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • An emulator, even a paid one, would be totally legal in the US as long as:

    1. It does not use any patented technologies. I’m not sure if Nintendo has any patents in the emulation space, but regardless the GBA is so simple that it wouldn’t require patented techniques to emulate.

    2. It does not contain any proprietary (copyrighted) code. On more modern consoles, this would include the BIOS or Firmware files. Does the GBA even need something like that?

    Number 1 is a non-issue for a GBA emulator. Number 2 is more tricky, but it’s always possible to reverse engineer and reimplement the firmware. That’s protected by the Compaq v. IBM case.

    The recent drama with the Switch emulator is that they violated the second principle.













  • Jobs? Probably Go.

    But really what’s most important is learning portable skills, which amounts to learning about different approaches. In that case, I’d say learn both.

    There are a lot of interesting ideas in both languages.

    (I learned a lot of great ideas from Go, especially about concurrency. I think it’s great for writing the kind of frameworks where that matters. But in terms of “normal” business logic programming, I think it’s trash. It not ergonomic at all.)